27 Jan
2017
27 Jan
'17
12:58 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Ron Blechner via Callers
<callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
To answer your question, though, about how many
dancers want genderfree
terms, at least ten dances are genderfree, and I bet we can poll those
dances and find out how many active dancers they have. While the Western
Mass one by me is a little low, dances like Brooklyn, Portland Maine, and
Montpelier second Saturday boast very large crowds, and that's just ones
I've personally attended. There's queer dance camps, too. Clearly there's a
demand. I realize "huge" is a relative number, but we can safely agree on
several thousand dancers as a safe low estimate of dancers who want gender
free roles.
You're classifying everyone who attends a dance with gender-free
calling as having wanting it to be gender free, but I'm sure some are
attending in spite of it being gender free, and many more don't care
either way.
These genderfree dances exist, some for 39 years,
they've grown tremendously
in the last 5 years *while many traditional dances are losing attendance*.
That's not what it looks like to me. The particular dances that have
been gender free for a long time are mostly doing fine, but it doesn't
look to me like they're growing tremendously. Instead, newer
fast-growing dances are either started as gender free or are switching
to it. I don't think the causality goes the way you're suggesting.
This isn't some existential threat to
non-genderfree
traditional dances. Let us talk.
Some pushback seems reasonable to me. Just like I think people should
be able to dance either role at any contra dance, I think all contra
dances should move to being gender free. Not immediately -- it's fine
to take some more time to consense on terms, have some brave dances
try them out, have callers get used to calling them -- but I do think
moving entirely to gender free terms is what we should be doing as a
community.
Jeff